Restaurant Server Assistant App

UI/UX Design
Project Overview
The restaurant server assistant app was a class project focused on UI/UX design and the design process. Given the topic of Food Production and Industry, we decided to focus on restaurant works and more specifically servers in restaurants where tips tend to be expected. Our task was to create a prototype of a system that would make server's job responsibilities easier to manage.

The Process

Personas and User Scenarios

User Research: Understanding the Problem

Interviews and Surveys

To start, we recruited local restaurant staff for semi-structured interviews. To the right you can see the set of questions that we started with, but this was just meant to be a jumping off point. I personally conducted 2 interviews that lasted about 1 hour each and provided us with in-depth insights into a server's responsibilities. We also conducted a survey that we sent out online.

"Sarah is a 20-year-old waitress who works at Rocky Mountain Pizza in Home Park. She chose to work here because she lives in Home Park and the restaurant is a short walk from her house. She lives in a house with three other students, all of whom attend Georgia Tech, which is a short walk across 10th street. She is currently studying computer science at Tech and a lot of her classes are pretty time-consuming. Luckily at Rocky, almost all of the servers go to Tech so they understand the time commitment that school can be and at times are able to help each other out by taking or swapping shifts."
Goals
  • Balance work and school life
  • Communicate effectively with customers
  • Make good tips
  • Perform her duties well 
Frustrations
  • Scheduling issues that slow service
  • Customers who complain without reason
  • Customers who are extra nice to compensate for lower tips
Behaviors
  • Might get on her phone when the restaurant is slow
  • Makes sure that her customers are taken care of
  • Gets a little messed up with the POS system interface
Skills
  • Communication: a must-have (90%)
  • Work Ethic: decent but might fall short (65%)
  • Emotion Control: frustrations happen (70%)

Above is an excerpt from one of our persona creations. As you can see it is very specific. We used these personas to then created user scenarios in which the personas may attempt to use our design idea. We also looked at very specific task analyses where we took a specific goal or task that a server completes and created a detailed outline of how the server would complete the task before our intervention, as you can see below. All of the techniques were used to increase our understanding of our user group.

Ideation: 3 Low Fidelity Prototypes

Table Recorder and App
Non-Technical Server Notepad and Question List
Wearable Earpiece Recorder and App

System Prototype and Evaluation

The final prototype was created in figma so that it could be easily tested on a mobile device.

View Full Prototype on Figma
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